"Now there is the possibility of getting a feed listing your updated spreadsheets, and since there is more than one way to think of a spreadsheet, we give you two different feed schemas for viewing. A worksheet could be viewed as entries of individual cells or as a list of rows similar to a database table."

As part of our ongoing efforts to bolster collaboration between Google and the open source community, we're pleased to announce that the Open Source Program Office will begin hosting a monthly "Open Source Developers @ Google" Speaker Series. Several of our colleagues at Google who are open source contributors will be providing insight into their work at Google. All sessions will be open to the public and we'll also be making the presentations available on Google Video.

MySQL Winter of Code - Kaj Arnö (MySQL's Vice President of Community) claims more code is written in winter, so MySQL has launched a project in the style of Google's "Summer of Code" to harness this potential.

An article entitled "Interactive Developer Zone Top Performance Tips" written interactively in real time by participants. The outcome of this talk will be posted to the MySQL Developer Zone soon.

The unconference format created an excellent opportunity for interactive participation in discussions, as well as a flexible schedule, so lots more went on than you see in the list above, more even than in the official schedule!

Big hugs to everyone from the MySQL community who joined us here at Google over the weekend, and thanks for running what turned out to be a great social and technical event! Google is proud to be associated with such a fantastic community.

"For those of you who have been trying to build client-side GData mashups but have been thwarted by the same-origin policy, we have some good news for you: you can now get public Base, Blogger, and Calendar feeds as JSON! This means that you can start displaying GData in your web page with a little JavaScript."

If you use our project hosting service to manage your open source code, then you'll be happy to hear that we're now running Subversion 1.4. In short, this means you can now use the svnsync tool to both push and pull version-control history to and from your Google Code repository. You can read about pushing and pulling in our FAQ.

We also added support for languages of another type as well -- Code Search now detects code in more programming languages (AppleScript, COBOL, ColdFusion, Haskell, Modula-2, Modula-3, OCaml, R, Rebol, SML, and VHDL), which appear in the language drop-down on the Advanced Code Search page. If your programming language of choice isn't in there, just use the the file: operator to restrict your search to files with the right extensions. For example, you could restrict your search to files with a .zz extension with a query like foo file:\.zz$. (More info in the FAQ.)

As a Spanish engineer in Google's Zurich office, my days tend to be pretty multilingual. So it's been great to be part of the effort to help Google Code Search understand a few new languages as well.

"Just send us a shopping cart via an HTML form with name=value pairs, and manage the orders using our Merchant Center interface. You can easily specify shipping options and sales tax options in the shopping cart as well."

The LinuxBIOS project aims to take down the last barrier in Open Source systems by providing a free firmware (BIOS) implementation. LinuxBIOS celebrates its Sixth anniversary this year, and has an installed base of over 1 million LinuxBIOS systems. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that number is expected to exceed 10 million users in 2007. LinuxBIOS supports 65 mainboards from 31 vendors in v1 and another 56 mainboards from 27 vendors in v2.

There's always been one main obstacle for our project though: unlike other free software, LinuxBIOS can easily make your hardware a paperweight if you encounter a bug (unless you happen to have a spare flash chip...). Thanks to Google's sponsorship, we've been able to significantly improve the project's Quality Assurance process by creating a completely automated and distributed testing environment. Every single commit results in BIOS images being built for all mainboards, and tested on real hardware located all over the world. So whenever you want to download a LinuxBIOS image, you can now know that it works on a reference machine before flashing it to your system.

A per-revision overview is available, as are test results for specific revisions, and you can even get detailed reports that include extensive logs for each motherboard. Developers can also use the build and test system without checking their code into the LinuxBIOS repository. The automatic build client has an option to submit BIOS images to the test system manually; you can see an overview of manually triggered builds here. Anyone with a spare board supported by LinuxBIOS is welcome to put it into the automated test system, thus helping the LinuxBIOS project increase their quality on your hardware.

Last week, Google hosted the Ubuntu Developer Summit at our Mountain View headquarters. Developers and community members from across the world congregated over six days to plan the next release of Ubuntu Linux, code named Feisty Fawn. More details about the technical sessions are available. For those interested in learning more about the distro and community, you may enjoy the video of Mark Shuttleworth's presentation to interested Googlers about Ubuntu.

Thanks to the Ubuntu community for visiting and being such wonderful guests!

Evan Schoenberg, mentor and organization administrator for Adium, has posted a writeup on Adium's participation in GSoC 2006. It's wonderful to hear that several of their students plan to continue working on Adium; it's also great to see that the Adium is further benefiting from GSoC through work done by a student working with the Gaim project this summer. Evan also included some advice for students interested in working with Adium for GSoC, and his advice is definitely useful to any student thinking of applying for the program next year:

Get the code and have a look around before making time estimates. Parts of Adium are, to be honest, pretty spaghetti-like code. It's also a lot larger than most student projects. Having a feel for these issues will help you plan more accurately. Google Summer of Code is intended to be a full-time internship, demanding full-time hours; schedule your summer appropriately, as it will be fun but also hard work.

Congratulations to Adium's mentors and students for all of their achievements this summer, and many thanks to Adium for joining us in the program once again!

Because of the important work Creative Commons accomplished over the past year, Google has decided again to donate $30,000 to their cause. Here's an update on some of the awesome work they've been doing:

ccPublisher can connect to other media repositories (such as the Internet Archive), and has been localized.

Creative Commons established an open source developer's community, a portal for discussion lists, projects and challenges that focus on the standards and technology that support the Creative Commons licenses.

From January 2006 to July 2006, CC license linkbacks grew from 40,000,000 to 140,000,000, indicating a near exponential growth in CC license adoption.